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This study aims to examine the environmental impact of fossil fuel use in newly industrialized countries (NICs), focusing on the relationship between economic growth, energy consumption and environmental sustainability from 1971 to 2020.

The research uses pool mean group autoregressive distributive lag, fully modified ordinary least squares and dynamic ordinary least squares econometric models to analyze long-run data. These methods enable a detailed assessment of how economic and industrial factors affect environmental pollution.

The study finds that nonrenewable energy consumption is positively linked to environmental pollution, with a 1% increase leading to a 6.25% rise in pollution. Industrialization, urbanization and globalization also significantly increase pollution, with increments of 2.51%, 3.97% and 2.11%, respectively. Conversely, economic growth has a beneficial effect, reducing pollution by 2.59% for every 1% increase in growth.

Policymakers should balance economic growth with environmental sustainability by reducing nonrenewable energy consumption and supporting renewable energy adoption.

This research provides fresh insights into the dynamics between economic growth and environmental pollution in NICs. By using advanced econometric techniques over an extended period, it offers a view of how economic and industrial activities influence environmental outcomes, highlighting the dual role of economic growth in both promoting development and reducing pollution.

Social protection states the public-mandated (strategies and programmes) to address the vulnerability and risk among poor and near-poor households. Social protection must not only help people meet their basic needs but also contribute to the long-term well-being and broader societal goals of equity, social justice and empowerment. The role of social protection in achieving these goals has not been adequately documented. This paper examines the performance of the social protection mechanism from the perspective of the regional structural and institutional performance indicators. Social protection outlay dynamics are synthesized in the structural and institutional conducts.

A world regional comparability is made by considering the panel dataset for the time interval 1995–2020. In empirics, the unconditional and conditional ranks are constructed, and regression analyses are made subject to (1) the fiscal constraint of social protection, (2) structural performance indicators and (3) the institutional performance indicators of the targeted regions across the globe. The fully modified-ordinary least square (FM-OLS) method is used to construct the ranks.

The rank analysis demonstrates that the developed regions (i.e. Europe, Central Asia and North America) have relatively good welfare standards and fiscal capacity for social protection drives compared to the developing/underdeveloped regions (i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). The structural/institutional performance indicators have shown their significance in determining/utilizing their budget for social protection and maintaining welfare standards. Interestingly, most developed regions are relatively reluctant to maintain the structural/institutional performance for the determination/execution of the funds for social protection as compared to the developing and underdeveloped regions.

In policy discourse, this research suggests that governments must make some market operations to enhance their regions’ structural and institutional performance to get better outcomes of social protection spending in the form of attractive welfare standards.

Multiple studies have been done considering the social protection dynamics at nano, micro and macro levels, while this study considered the mega dataset across the globe to analyse the social protection dynamics in consideration of structural and institutional performances.